Paul G. Tremblay Quotes

I don't like writing essays or theory.

To write, I think it is very important to read. The more you read, the more you know the techniques of writing.

I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.

I think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.

I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.

To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be.

I am a writer. Being critical is a writer's responsibility.

When I write for 'n+1,' I begin by doing a lot of reading, to try to convince myself I'm not stupid. Then I scribble down a paragraph here, a paragraph there, when a notion strikes. Then I see if I can arrange those notions in a way that yields an argument.

I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it's much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate, and infinitely better looking.

I'll be writing essays long after I've stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I'm capable of as a novelist, I'm more limited.

Authors like reading. Go figure. So it's not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.

I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.

I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on.

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.